Design
System

Making sense of the chaos. A spring board for scale. Design systems and Atomic design has changed the design environment forever.

Whether your design system is just a well-rounded collection of design library files or full fledged system like Lightning, it starts to create consistency and a clear language with which you’re communicating.

At UWA I helped devise the institutions very first design system.

-CHALLENGE-

A myriad of designs, old and new spread across multiple content management systems.

-SOLUTION-

Set your platform

We had already moved from Photoshop to Sketch and boy did we see the light.

Further we had employed InVision for our prototyping. But we were lacking a system to help wrangle all the design files and libraries.

Enter Abstract.

The learning curve

I’d already poured over almost every blog and video by Dan Frost and others covering everything on Atomic design principles. The next part was combining those principles into libraries.

-SOLUTION-

Build your libraries

The process was slow at first but also something that was somewhat cathartic. But over a short couple of weeks (including some weekends on my couch), we had the basics of a design library.

Dealing with disruption

Our design system libraries had now fastened our delivery time and stopped us from repeating ourselves over and over. We were also creating consistency across our designs. Huge leap forward.

But when disruption hit, we found an opportunity. The University was embarking on a long journey of repositioning itself, and along with this invariably comes another rebrand.

-SOLUTION-

Replumbing

Having my first swing at building a design system from scratch it’s fair to say, I learned a lot.

With the rebrand and an adjustment to our back-end environment we had a golden opportunity to re-architect our system, and create a truly expressive design system capable of accommodating sub-brands and extensions.